‘Birth of a Nation’ praised, but that’s not the whole story

“The Birth of a Nation,” the United States’ first movie epic, has been praised for a century for its pioneering innovations, while being lambasted for its depiction of the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic organization taking back its country.

Noting the Feb. 8, 2015, 100th anniversary of its premiere, Time magazine recently quoted Paul McEwan, a professor at Muhlenberg College, “I don’t think that for the last 10 or 15 years there has been any doubt that this is an unequivocally, viciously racist film.”

Directed by D.W. Griffith, the movie was based on Thomas Dixon’s novel, “The Clansman.” McEwan said in Time, “This film makes ‘Gone With the Wind’ look very progressive.”

There you have the capsule summary of Griffith’s pioneering epic, but there’s more. Here’s my version of at least part of the rest of the story.

In the first years of my teaching career at Alabama State University, several times I taught a course called Introduction to Mass Communication. Just as there are courses in art appreciation and music appreciation, I came to think of this as media appreciation. Of course, there was a chapter on movies.

I learned that most early movies were only about 25 minutes long, two reels of film. Griffith moved on to four-reel, 50-minute films. Looking beyond the text to other books, I learned that “The Birth of a Nation” was 12 reels, taking closer to three hours to view.

Griffith was from Kentucky, and his father had been a Confederate officer.

I found a source that said this:

"Griffith proved in 1915 that film could have powerful emotional and propagandistic effects at a time when the film industry was reaching wider and wider audiences who were coming to larger and more opulent theaters with greater expectations for entertainment and involvement. The racial troubles the film evoked so disturbed Griffith that he attacked racism in subsequent films."

This was the first time I'd seen any indication that Griffith had regretted what he had done and tried to make amends.

The first 25 film classics selected by the Library of Congress to be preserved as "national treasures" did not include "Birth of a Nation," but did include one that Griffith made the next year. That was "Intolerance."

One book said, "Griffith's 1916 'Intolerance,' a massive socio-historical study of human imperfection presented in four separate stories that were bound by the theme of intolerance, was a commercial failure primarily because it was too novel, too complex, too pacifistic. Indeed, it was years ahead of its time and led Griffith and his peers, including Charles Chaplin and Mack Sennett, to direct creative efforts along more tried-and-true lines in the interest of making" money.

A newspaperman for 25 years, Coke Ellington worked for the Montgomery Advertiser from 1984 to 1997. He teaches part-time in the Alabama State University communications department, where he taught full-time from 1997 to 2014.